Topic

Select a leadership-related problem or opportunity in your current or previous workplace and draw on relevant scholarly ideas and sources to:

1. provide an analysis that explains the nature, causes and effects of the problem or opportunity; AND
2. identify an intervention or approach that you argue will help to address the problem or opportunity, including specifying how you will personally seek to influence this, even if you have no formal authority to lean on.

Guidance

Selecting your focus

The problem or opportunity you select must be something leadership-related in your chosen organisation. Set out below are some possible leadership issues that could be explored:

• the leadership approach/style/practices or capability of your organisation/unit and how this affects matters such as employee motivation, trust, organisational culture or performance
• how issues of vision, mission, purpose and values are led within your organisation
• the ethics or values demonstrated by leaders in your organisation and the effects of this on employees, other stakeholders and organisational performance
• the leadership processes and practices the organisation uses to develop its standing within its industry

• cultural influences on the leadership approach taken or needed for your organisation
• leadership communication in your organisation and the effects of this on employees, other stakeholders and organisational performance
• how crisis leadership is enacted in your organisation and the effects of this on employees, other stakeholders and organisational performance
• the processes, dynamics and effects of leadership decision-making in your organisation
• how strategic leadership is enacted in your organisation and the effects of this on employees, other stakeholders and organisational performance
• how change leadership is enacted within your organisation and the effects of this on employees, other stakeholders and organisational performance (NB: do not confuse change leadership with the use of standardised change management or project management methodologies!)
• gender-related issues and dynamics in leadership in your organisation
• the underrepresentation of certain groups within the leadership ranks of your organisation (eg youth, women, different ethnic communities)
• informal leadership within your organisation
• dysfunctional or toxic leadership within your organisation and the effects of this on employees, other stakeholders and organisational performance
• how emerging leaders are identified and developed within in your organisation
• follower expectations and influence and how leaders respond to these
• how leadership is given an embodied expression within your organisation and the effects of this on employees, other stakeholders and organisational performance

Basically, you should be looking for a leadership-related issue, which may have multiple dimensions, that has significance for the organisation’s functioning and about which, guided by scholarly ideas, you could formulate ideas for how to make an improvement.

Note that any one of the above list of issues could constitute a suitable essay topic. At most you might consider addressing parts of perhaps two or three of the above options. This is because you should aim for depth of analysis, not shallow consideration of multiple issues. It may be that none of the above have direct relevance for the problem or opportunity in your workplace at this time, in which case you need to design your own focus, provided that this must still address the topic statement as set. If you are not sure about your proposed focus, then please discuss this with Suze or Patricia.

Developing your essay

Essentially you are to produce an account of ‘what is going on’ (diagnosis – element A) and ‘what can be done about it’ (prescription – element B) which is framed (i.e. conceptualised or theorized) by reference to scholarly knowledge.

Your response to element A of the topic statement should explain what is the problem or opportunity in depth. Use literature to inform and justify your diagnosis. While the topic statement directs to you explain the ‘nature, cause and effect’ of the problem of opportunity we of course recognise that in real life it is often difficult to tease apart which is ‘nature’, what is ‘cause’ and what is ‘effect’. You should therefore treat those terms as ‘cues’ for ways to unpack and explore the problem or opportunity in depth. Think about its various dimensions and characteristics. Aim to lay out a nuanced and insightful analysis of what is going on, in which you frame your thinking by drawing on relevant scholarly material and not simply relying on a lay-person’s description.

Your response to element B should explain what you propose should be done, why you are proposing this and how this will be done. As part of this you need to specifically address how you personally intend to influence what you propose should be done, regardless of whether you have formal authority to do so or not. Use literature to inform and justify what you are prescribing ought to be done.

Be specific about what you propose. Avoid a focus on solutions that are fundamentally more managerial in nature – such as dismissing poor performers – as the ideal approach. Avoid also approaches that are more in the nature of strategic management rather than leadership-oriented. Instead, try to think holistically about a range of leadership approaches that could help in addressing the issues at hand. It is likely the sources you explored for Assignments 1 and 2 could be of use here, but you are expected to also do independent research for this assignment.

If your problem or opportunity you are examining relates to something that happened in a previous workplace, rather than something that is still ongoing, please ensure that you approach element B of the topic statement as if the situation was still unresolved. Do not merely report on what did happen to address the problem or opportunity. The point of the exercise is for you to figure out for yourself what might be helpful when dealing with the problem or opportunity you are analysing, meaning just reporting on what did happen is of little value for your learning. Essentially you need to ‘step back in time’ to a point where the problem or opportunity was unresolved and figure out what would have been a useful way forward at that point.

Your essay must be analytic in style and focus, not descriptive. For example, the following is descriptive – it deals with issues of what happened, when and who did what, while also making no use of any relevant concepts, theories or models:

The problem first arose last year when senior leaders could not reach agreement over the annual bonus policy, meaning staff got mixed messages about priorities from different members of the senior leadership team. This saw staff morale take a hit.

While you will need to make some occasional and brief descriptive statements to set the scene, limit these as much as possible because their weakness, as a piece of academic work, is that they offer no theoretical/conceptual analysis to demonstrate your engagement with scholarly literature. They offer no insights into why we might see a situation such as this occur, which engaging with theory and concepts affords.

The following, however, is strongly analytic, providing clear evidence of your engagement with relevant literature, via citations and the use of scholarly terms, while weaving in some descriptive elements to keep the narrative flowing:

Conflicting values and competing political coalitions (Green, 2015) amongst senior leaders led to disagreement about an annual bonus policy. This policy was intended to motivate via extrinsic rewards (White, 2016). However, because of the disagreement staff got mixed messages about priorities from different members of the senior leadership team. The flow on effects include a reduction in discretionary effort by employees (Red, 2015), reduced organisational citizenship behaviours (Orange, 2014) and eroded employee trust in management (Blue, 2013).

Obviously the ‘citations’ are of fictionalized sources. However, what should also be clear is that the analysis conceptualises or theorizes the situation by using scholarly knowledge. This is what we are looking for, as it demonstrates your ability to apply scholarly knowledge to actually analyse a real-world case. It shows, in other words, that you have grasped hold of the intellectual tools of theory and concepts which you can then apply in multiple situations, rather than just narrating a story about events in your workplace.

Your case study will be treated in confidence, so you can be blunt in your analysis, knowing the information will not be divulged further. You may use pseudonyms if you wish.

NB: do not repeat the same case analysis you did for 115725! You must choose a different issue to explore or, alternatively, explore that same issue but using different literature. TurnItIn will catch you out if you ignore this advice!

Some basis tips about structuring your case study:

• structure your case study as you would an essay, i.e. with an introduction, a body and a conclusion
• approximately 10% of your essay (i.e. 250 words) should be dedicated to your introduction and conclusion, so these each need to be carefully crafted to be succinct
• parts A and B should be roughly 1125 words each – so depth of both diagnosis (what is the problem/opportunity) and prescription (what should be done about it) are expected

• in structuring the body of your essay you can either explain your analysis of the problem first (Part A of the topic statement) and then follow that with your proposed approach (Part B of the topic statement) OR, alternatively, for each element of the problem/opportunity you set out (ie your response to Part A of the topic statement) you can at that point also set out your proposed approach (ie your response to Part B of the topic statement). Either approach can work well.
• do not provide headings for sections within an essay of this length

A minimum of 15 scholarly references is expected. Wikipedia is not a scholarly source. Commercial websites are not a scholarly source. Trade magazines are not scholarly sources. YouTube is not a scholarly source. The scholarly sources we would expect to see as your primary focus should be peer-reviewed journal articles in scholarly journals or books or chapters written by scholars.

Assessment 3 marking factors and weightings

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